Harry Potter and the Brisket Loaf
by evil-underlord
Summary: This is it. The final year of Hogwarts, the final reckoning, when evil is defeated and the whole world is turned on its head.
1. Part 1

Harry Potter 7: Harry Potter and the Brisket Loaf/The Adventures of Robert Langdon 3: The Brisket Code

**FACT!**

Magic is real. Hogwarts is a real place. All of the spells and rituals described in this book have actually been performed. I am actually a really clever person, who has done loads of research. And I'm good looking too.

Prologue

It was a cold, dreadful day. Mist curled about the spires of Hogwarts School for witches and Wizzrobes in a menacing way, like an army of dementors was somehow breeding on its sacred grounds. Only they weren't, because they can't get in. Except now that Dumbledore's dead, maybe they can get in. It's up to you to work it out. I've given you enough clues already, haven't I? And as to it being cold, you may ask, what with it being July, well, we are quite far north... and VOLDEMORT IS ON THE RAMPAGE! It's dramatic irony, the whole microcosm/macrocosm thing. Christ and Aslan, Jane Austen never had to put up with this kind of criticism.

So it's cold and dreary and dark, and miserable. Why did I ever move to Scotland? I don't know. I should have stayed in Portugal. The mist obscures everything, but through it we can see a figure walking alone. He hurries against the wind, his heavy robe pulled tight around his body, and around the book he carries with him. It is an old grimoire, full of the most powerful and deadly spells, but also full of spells that might give hope to mankind. Like spells about antimatter and shit. I hear that stuff is really popular these days. Scratch that, it contains even more achingly up-to-date spells. Quantum anti matter. For getting us to other planets, in case this one blows up in a hundred million years time or so. That'll hit the zeitgeist.

All these thoughts went through the old man's head as he ran. he knew that by rights he should be safe, here on the grounds of Hogwarts (TM), but he had a feeling that he wasn't. He was right.

Out of the mist the Death Eater loomed.

'H- how?' the old man stammered

'Give me the Book,' the death eater drawled.

'Never.'

'The book...'

'You, I know your voice, but I thought...'

'Accio Intestines.'

The old man cried out but it was cut short as his guts exploded from his body. He fell to the ground heavily. The Death Eater stepped over his body and retrieved the gory book from the rictus clutches of the old man's cold hands and walked off without another word.

'...you were with us.' The last words of the dying man steamed into the frozen air to mingle with the steam from his steaming innards. The Wizzard Plotus Devicius was dead.

Chapter 1

Hundreds of miles away Harry Potter was boffing Ginny Weasley. Ron really wanted to be boffing Hermione, but she wasn't letting him, so he was sulking. Why did his bloody best friend have to be getting off with his sister. It was icky. Didn't they know that this would completely ruin their friendship, like totally, for ever. It was all very nice now, but what happened in twenty years time, when Harry was fat and Ginny wasn't putting out, and he was in the middle.

Or if they broke up. That would be it, that would be the end. He would have to side with his sister, and probably break Harry's legs, if his mum didn't do it first, and he didn't really want to. But that was what you got if you disrespected the family. All those drive-bys he and Harry had shared, capping Malfoy's homies, that was all good. But family came first.

Hey thought Ron, suddenly. This is me. I've got control of the narrative. While they're having sex, there's no way that the text can stick with Harry's P.O.V. That would just be too risky for a mass market, cross-genre mega-book like this. That makes me the main character. All thoughts of bitterness and ick-factor that accompanied the rhythmic bumping that he could hear, the groans and shouts and perverse incantations that came through the thin walls of the Burrow from the room next door left his mind. In flooded visions of power, of fame and money. Of the whole world knowing HIS thoughts and feelings, caring about HIS mundanities and trivial everyday stuff. HE would be the one who got to come up with lame-arse metaphors that no-one understood to convey his angst out to a caring, adoring public. He would be-

Harry Potter rolled onto his back, the slight soreness of his knob swiftly dispersing into a tired and sweaty feeling of pleasure that crept through his body. Fuck off Ron, he thought to himself, the monster inside his chest appeased at the good workout he had just given it, you'll just have to get yourself a blog like everyone else. Beside him, Ron's sister pulled the sheet around her perfect body.

Harry stared at the cracks in the ceiling, thinking how they mirrored the cracks in his life. All the people who had died because he was such a useless twat. Ah well, he thought. No point worrying, this was a new book. No-one was going to remember any of that shit, so he surely didn't have to.

Chapter 2

Thousands of miles away in Boston, or some over place in America, I don't know. Somewhere near Harvard University. I live in bloody Scotland, don't I? Where's that tweed jacket, I have to wear a tweed jacket to write these scenes, someone told me that I have to wear a tweed jacket if I want to do these bits properly.

The balmy July night of Hollywood, Harvard University, drifted in through the open French windows of Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University's mock-Georgian, 16th century concentric castle. The scented air rolled across the finely gilted, hand woven Persian carpets (TM) that he had bought at the CarpetRight January sale last year, and onto his silk and satin sheets. A phone began to ring. It kept ringing, until Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University stretched out a tweed pyjama'd arm to pick it up.

'Hello?' he said. But the line was dead.

The phone continued to ring.

'Oh, it's me. Sorry,' a woman's voice said. She pulled out a mobile phone and began to speak into it. Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University didn't understand most of what she said, but he knew that it was probably important to the plot, and may well save his life at some point within the next twenty four hours or so he tried to listen very carefully. It was something about Phoenixes and Dark Marks, the transperambulation of pseudo-cosmic antimatter was in there as well. He really wished that he had an extra brain, one that was actually useful. Maybe in a jar and attached to a killer nazi robot. That would be really cool.

He had read somewhere that for the first five minutes or so after you wake up you can be legally classed as insane, for the purposes of criminal justice and so forth. This seemed somehow important to him. Also, Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University had morning glory, and there was at least one woman in the room at the moment.

Oh shit, he thought. I'm going to make a fool of myself aren't I?

'Sorry about that,' the woman said, putting her Samsung G-18 wap enabled picture phone away.

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University opened his eyes. Next to his eyes there was a grey streak in his hair, that he didn't like but that all of the females at Harvard University, who were really quite clever, but probably not as clever as a man could be, but, you know almost – when they weren't thinking about kittens, thought made him look distinguished. Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University liked their boobs, but he didn't say that, because then they might not have thought that he was distinguished. Instead he went swimming all the time, because it was manly, and helped to take his mind off his impure thoughts.

'Professor McGonagall,' Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University said. 'And Madam Hooch. I haven't seen you two since that conference two years ago. Do you always come together?'

'It's a trick,' said Hooch. 'It's about practise, trust and not a little love.'

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University blushed. He had seen a lot of them at the party after that conference, and he had kind of hoped that he wouldn't see them again. Although, if they had enjoyed it as well, and they were all adults...

'I don't think he quite meant that,' McGonagall said in her broad Irish brogue. 'But... no. We are here to talk business, Mr Langdon. There has been a murder, well quite a few actually, and some other stuff.'

'And you need me to come and sort it all out for you?' asked Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University.

'Not really no,' said Hooch, 'we've got all that covered. There's a couple of bratty kids who everyone loves that are all superpowered up and stuff, there dealing with all that stuff. We just came to offer you a job.'

'But I have a job,' said Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University. 'I'm a professor of Symbology, here at Harvard University.'

'Semiotics,' said McGonagall.

'What?' said Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University.

'The study of signs and symbols, what you do. It's called semiotics. Well, what _you_ do is actually not a real discipline at all, so really you'll have no problem with this new job. It's as Teacher of the Defence against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts in Scotland, London-'

'Is that in England?'

'Yes. It's full of spurious religious crap. You'll get along just fine.'

'Why me?'

Madam Hooch began to speak. 'McGonagall's head of the school now, so she gets to choose who we hire. The two of us thought it might be nice to have you around for a year.'

'A year? I thought this was one of those twenty four hour jobs. That's what it says in my contract you know. Twenty four hours.'

'I know, but this is a different narrative structure, and we're already locked into it. It would be a real favour to us. A real _big_ favour. And anyway, surely you know that you're a wizard, you might as well spend some time with the rest of us.'

'I'm not a wizard.'

'Yes you are. Have you ever noticed that you can do things that ordinary people can't, especially in times of stress.'

'Everything I ever do is meticulously researched. Anyone could do it. If they were fit enough and looked like Tom Hanks.'

'I thought you looked much better as Harrison Ford,' McGonagall interjected.

'You think that anyone could fall two miles from a helicopter into a shit-filled inner-city river and survive?' Hooch continued. 'You're even stupider than I thought. And that's even after giving you the benefit of the doubt on all that mirror writing stuff.'

'OK, OK,' Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University said. 'Point taken, I'll come with you. So, how do we get to Hogwarts, some kind of top-secret supersonic jet that goes faster than the laws of physics? How about a transporting spell, or a magical polar express train with all creepy animal on it.'

'Virgin Atlantic actually. We'll see you in the airport tomorrow at noon.'

'But where will you be?'

'Why,' smiled the catlike features of Madam Hooch, 'In the executive lounge of course.'

Chapter 3

OK, so, if you look on the back of this book, on the inside flap, there'll be a picture. Blonde woman, stunningly attractive, that sort of thing. So, there's this witch who looks just like that, and she lives in Edinburgh castle. Her name is Jerome K Jerome Rowlingessa Starchild and she is the most powerful witch ever. She goes out with Legolas, but that's neither here nor there, and her eyes are black with stars in them. And SHE DOESN'T WRITE FANTASY.

Pratchett quivered before her, but it was too late, she was quick to anger and never let a slight go unpunished. 'Just because I'm making more money than you are,' she said, and then she turned Pterry into a Ptoad. Ptah.

For fuck's sake. I plot more like a thriller writer anyway, with everything down in advance. You fantasy writers will find any old excuse to write a sequel, even if there's no continuity at all.

Oh yeah. Harry Potter did some shit too.

Chapter 4

The Hogwarts Express is a heavily modified three cylinder 4-6-2 locomotive built initially in Crewe in 1956 to a design by noted engineer R.A. Riddles. Engines fitted with its experimental B.R. 13 boiler had initially found problems running on Britain's muggle railways, plagued by mystery steam-flow malfunctions and under-par running and draw. It was only with the arrival of M.G.M. Awizardname in his workshop that Riddles could finally locate and solve the original flaw in his revolutionary design.

The new locomotive was fitted with a lower body casing, chrome wheels and a system of lights that shone from underneath the cover plates as well as a natty red paint job. These changes to the original design provided a final 500 horsepower to add to the innovative engine's already impressive 4000 maximum. The newly christened 73000 King of Essex was bought by a mysterious government department calling themselves the Ministry of Serendipity, in actual fact the Ministry of Magic, and renamed The Hogwarts Express. It was given some further, magical modifications, including expanding the capacity of the tender to enable all-day running, and put to work on a special line run exclusively between London's Liverpool Street and Scotland's Hogwarts Terminal.

R.A. Riddles went mad after he found that he could never reproduce an engine like the Essex again. But he's some muggle so he doesn't matter.

The Hogwarts Express steamed through the bright sunshine at a boiler-straining 136mph. Onboard, Harry, Ron and Hermione sat in their usual carriage. Ginny was with them and she sat snuggled up against Harry with her feet across two seats, Harry resting his hand on one of her tits.

'So, what's the plan, Harry?' asked Ron, trying to snake his arm around Hermione's waist. Hermione deposited his hand elsewhere.

'I dunno,' Harry said. 'I suppose we're gonna have to go through school and that. Study for our NEWTs. Then, something will happen around the end of the year, probably in June. There'll be some clues before hand, but we really only have to worry about it about the time we have to start revising.'

'But I'm already revising.' Hermione said.

'I thought that you weren't going to school this year, Harry,' Ginny said to him. 'I thought that you were going to bunk off and like, try to find the horcruxes. Defeat Darth Vader and that.'

'Did I say that?'

'Yeah, at the end of the last book.'

'Oh yeah, I wouldn't pay any attention to the stuff I say at the end of the books. Deadlines, lack of sleep, I'm usually not thinking straight. I'd just forget about it if I were you, I have. I mean, I was going to break up with you wasn't I?'

'Yeah, you were. But then I did that thing, remember?'

'What, the,' Harry looked down at himself meaningfully 'thing?'

'Yes. That thing.'

'Urrgh!' said Ron. 'Cut it out you two.'

'Just cos Hermione's never done that thing on you,' Harry laughed.

Hermione shot Harry a filthy look and Ron threw a sweet wrapper at his friend's head.

Chapter 5

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts admired his fine new Harris Tweed robes and very impressive pointy stick that he had been given. The immensely attractive and frighteningly clever female professor Minerva McGonagall had called it a wand. He wondered what it was capable of.

He wandered around his new quarters. They were rather dingy, having previously belonged to professor Snape, a bad guy now, or so he had been told. But Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts knew how these things worked. If it looked like Snape was a bad guy from the very first page then it was almost certain that he wouldn't be. It would be whoever seemed to be the least likely person. Whoever looked the most likely to be a target would almost certainly be the one who was orchestrating the entire affair.

He would need to put a Jacuzzi in here, certainly. Do something about the damp as well, but this Snape fellow had a lot of very interesting books, and Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts knew a lot about books. Especially if they were full of spurious, pseudo-religious crap and half-baked references to mythology, which these books certainly were. Lists of random creatures cobbled together from half a dozen cultures at once, spells with names derived from schoolboy Latin.

And amongst it all, a number of books written about, or maybe by, a character calling himself the Half-Blood Prince. This Half-Blood Prince seemed to be possessed of an amazing understanding. Could he in fact be the missing link that was never really explained at the end of the Da Vinci Code? A half-blooded descendent of the messiah, part human and part divine? Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts knew that he would be the one to find out. And he was looking forward to the challenge.

Chapter 6

Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape sat side by side in the all black Lear jet that Voldemort had sent to pick them up from the Hogsmeade airstrip.

'Have you read this book?' Draco asked Snape, showing him the cover.

'What, the Da Vinci Code? Yeah.' Snape drawled.

'What did you think?'

'I liked the ending. It tied everything up nicely. But it wasn't very believable.'

Draco ignored his former teacher. 'Don't you think that it's amazing? Some of the stuff in there, it's like, it's like a whole different way of looking at things.'

'You think?' Snape asked. He was wondering how a story that involved a character who was currently working at Hogwarts, in his old job, could possibly exist in this world. It didn't make an awful lot of sense.

'I mean,' Draco continued, 'it's so obvious that the church has been covering all this stuff up, to oppress women and to oppress us all. Its like, there's all this stuff going on that you cant even know about. But he's managed to tell us about it. I mean, it must be true. All of it.'

Snape sighed. What did I do to deserve this? he thought.

Oh yeah. That.

Chapter 7

As evening descended the Hogwarts Express steamed on into the countryside. Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom had knocked on Harry Potter's carriage door, holding hands, and asked him about the DA and how he might need a well trained group of supporters when going up against the dark legions of the re-born evil.

'Nah, that whole thing was good when we were just fighting the ministry and that fat bitch teacher,' Harry had said, 'You guys were good to have around. But Voldemort, we'll, he's a woofter isn't he? I should be alright without any help.' _And I've got a much bigger, much harder dick than he has anyway _the monster inside Harry's chest added. The monster that was a metaphor for his MANhood, in case you hadn't noticed. Just thought I'd mention it.

Neville and Luna had slunk off then, muttering to each other.

'I wonder where Draco is?' Harry said, to no-one in particular.

'He's off, isn't he?' Ron said. 'You defeated him and now he's slunk off to the Knights of Walpurgis with his tail between his legs.'

'I don't know if that's quite the way it happened, Ron,' Hermione admonished. 'Draco may be too thick and too stubborn to recognise it but, and by god I can't see why he did it because I would have killed the boy myself, Dumbledore saved him. If the thick cunt-'

'Hermio-'

'-has any two brain cells to rub together then he's got some real thinking to do.'

'But I still wonder what he's up to. Right now.' Harry said, almost dreamily.

'Well, you shouldn't dear,' Ginny said, her voice peculiarly hard. 'You've got _me_ now.'

'He might be plotting against us. That's all that I meant.'

'They're always plotting against you, Harry, aren't they?' Hermione sighed. 'Snape's trying to steal the Philosopher's Stone, Draco is the heir of Slytherin...'

'I know that they were both innocent then, Hermione,' Ron said, 'but they have both turned out to be out to get us.'

'Don't you think that it might have been your constant suspicion, that the constant accusations the two of you have made against the two of them that might have led them to hate you so much? They're both dickweeds who didn't really like you, Harry, but you're the one who's really carried the grudge. You're the one who's been pressing it at every opportunity. And Ron hasn't really helped. I love you both dearly, but I think that if we're going to have to fight this then we need to do so with a full knowledge of what we're fighting. And if that means knowing our own mistakes and weaknesses then that's what we have to do. No matter how hard and how painful that may be.'

'Last year was a bit of a mess,' Ron said mournfully. 'We tried but we were outmanoeuvred on every important occasion. We kept hitting at all the wrong spots, chasing shadows and illusions, classic overworking, and that's why we lost Dumbledore. It's like we sacrificed our queen for nothing.'

'Overworking?' asked Harry.

'Yeah, and all our own fault.'

'But what do you mean? And why was Dumbledore a queen? A lush maybe, but he was straight as an arrow.'

'It's chess mate,' Ron said. 'I wasn't thinking about it right, I was letting my emotions get in the way, but I can see now every tactical move that we made was wrong...'

As Hermione, and then Ron had been speaking, a very dark look had crossed Ginny's features. The train began to slow in the twilight and she suddenly sat bolt upright. 'We're here,' she said with just a touch of overenthusiasm. 'Wow, so that's what one of those Thestrals looks like.'

Chapter 8

Snape was disturbed. The meeting with his master had not gone in quite the manner he had expected. He was seriously beginning to reconsider the way he had been playing things up until now. He wasn't so far in that he could not get out again, despite the way things looked, but he would have to be cautious.

Although, he thought as he looked out of the window of the private car at the winding alpine roads, maybe not all that cautious. Snape looked at the mountains but his eyes did not see them. Instead his mind was cast back to an hour ago, to the strange words that Lord Voldemort had said to him.

'All this stuff that I've been doing,' the dark wizard had said, 'all of it is no longer important. A friend of mine told me something a month or two ago, just before he disappeared in the strangest circumstances, and I think I've only just worked out what he meant. He said "The man has a machine and it will record our voices. It goes da-di-da-da-da and he will make albums of us and we can live forever."'

'But Lord,' Snape had said. 'What happened next? Where is this man now?'

'Vegas,' Voldemort had said dismissively. 'I don't know. The point is, before he went, he told me that he had found the thing that I want most. A way to live forever, maybe a way that doesn't involve me killing loads of people and chopping my soul up in that way I've been doing. Wouldn't that be something worth pursuing? And it could work for all of us. All.'

Da-di-da-da-da.

The words continued to chase through Snape's mind, and the car drove on.

Chapter 9

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts stepped out into the warm, balmy air of tropical Scotland. His stomach was full of the rich meats and pastries of the inaugural feast and his head was swimming with the madness of the speeches he had heard. He had also been taking in quite an eyeful of the obviously incredibly talented and dazzlingly clever sixth-formers who had been in the room. Apparently you came of age at seventeen in the wizarding world. But the speeches, what he had heard of them, they had been weird. All this stuff about wars and dark wizards and magic and self-sacrifice and a whole load of other concepts that he couldn't quite get his head around. Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts had needed to step outside and clear his head after all of that.

Carrying his straining stomach, almost at full capacity having been loaded up with 1.48 litres of compacted food, Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts let the air fill his lungs, knowing that a fully oxygenated bloodstream would significantly improve his digestive abilities. He was just glad that he had remembered to chew his food thoroughly before swallowing it, thereby utilising all the enzymes that were held in his saliva and kickstarting the breakdown process. There was no way that he would be letting any of the nutrients he had just ingested go to waste; he'd been caught out one too many times before having to do all sorts of heroics on little to no sustenance and he wasn't going to let it happen again. A man who chewed his food properly was a man who knew how to live his life.

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts realised something about grey hair. And aging. But he chose to ignore it. In about two hours time the contents of his stomach would have been fully rendered down into a semi-liquid chyme and then it would be passed into his small intestine ready for absorption, and he needed to be ready for that.

As he wandered through the ancient grounds of Hogwarts castle Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts began to think some more about the mystery of the Half-Blood Prince. About the strange recipes that this character had hinted at in his notes. Strange and wonderful recipes. Recipes for the kind of food that might keep you going for days without needing to cook another meal. Cheap, wholesome recipes that nevertheless reminded one of home and one's mother. If one had had a mother, which Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts had never had, but he could imagine what it might be like to have had one, and how these recipes, so beguilingly hinted at, might remind a man of one.

He walked, not quite knowing where he was going, until he reached the very edge of the castle's grounds and found himself on the shores of Loch Fyne, indeed the place where that mediocre seafood-restaurant-chain did its fishing, the giant, oceanic inlet that borders Hogwarts school for heathens and deicidal maniacs that I am usually content to call a lake, because most children are stupid and wouldn't understand the difference anyway. Not that I'm writing for children, I'm writing for myself.

Oh.

Fuck.

A sudden ripple of movement disturbed the still waters of the lake. Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts did not notice at first, rapt as he was in the truly outstanding view that was being afforded him. This really was a lot nicer than Harvard. As the reflections of the moon and the stars up above began to distort and fold in upon themselves Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts started to take notice. And then, silently, spectacularly a giant shape rose from the waters. It was a beautiful animal, a destroyer of worlds. It was the giant squid.

Calamari.

'Don't even think about it.' the giant squid said. 'My entire body is flushed through with ammonia for buoyancy, and it would make me taste disgusting.'

'I never said anything,' protested Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts.

'Yeah, but you were thinking it,' the giant squid replied.

'You have me all wrong,' Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts said. '_Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn_.'

'_Rth'glwah klhthgn fwe'ghng. Pyr'ghadl wgah'kygn_. You speak the tongue of the great old ones, my ancestors? I am impressed.'

'Of course I do, _dgythe'fth hgt'klp Cthulhu fhtagn_.'

'I'm flattered. In return, I will tell you something that I know, something important. The Half-Blood Prince is not the thing that you should be looking for. They found out who he was at the end of the last book.'

'And he wasn't Jesus?'

'No. But there are things that are being hidden from you, and the Prince may hold some of those clues. Search them out, and be careful. You may be being set up.'

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts said in his most gravelly voice: 'I'm always being set up.'

'Just, keep an eye in the mirror, if you know what I mean,' the giant squid said.

By the way, all this time they've been talking in R'lyehian only I haven't written it in that, I've been writing it in American, not because I can't understand and speak fluent R'lyehian or anything, it's just to help you guys, who can't.

'I'm not going to sleep with you at the end of this though,' said Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts.

'That's OK. I didn't think you were.'

'It's just, I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea or anything, because usually if I talk to someone in their own language it's because I want to sleep with them.'

'That's OK. I understand. I'm fine.'

'That's good. I just wanted to make sure that we were clear. So we're cool?'

'We're cool.'

'Cool.'

'You want to play bridge next week?'

'Yeah. You're on.'

Chapter 10

'Seven deadly sins

Seven ways to win

Seven holy paths to hell

And your trip begins

Seven downward slopes

Seven bloodied hopes

Seven are your burning fires

Seven your desires...'

The witch sang quietly to herself as she walked the black and midnight paths just outside of Hogwarts castle, secreting the thin white device she carried within her robes. She toyed gently, absent-mindedly, with the heavy pendant that hung from her neck, but checked herself. She had to be careful not to disturb it much or else all of her plans might be undone.

The walk ahead was a long one, but she did not mind, she had selected an accompaniment that would last its length. Her favourite album in fact. Behind her, once again the interminable yearly farce that was the sorting had begun, with its tortured, shoehorned song and all of the little brats mewing about what poxy house they wanted to be in and how they thought that that was really important.

And the yearly introduction of the new Defence against the Dark arts teacher. A chance to wring yet another jaundiced ounce of tension out of the great feast. At least Dumbledore wasn't around to show off this year, but it wasn't like McGonagall didn't have a bit of the old drama queen hiding underneath that excessively pointy hat she wore.

'The evil that men do lives on and on...

The evil that men do lives on and on...

The evil that men do lives on and on...

The evil that men do lives on and on...'

The witch walked on, head nodding in time with the basslines that were Steve Harris's signature. The night crowded in around her. The moon had not yet risen. She had a plan, a plan that would keep them busy while she finished her researches into the book that she now controlled. They had been foolish, very foolish, to let her get her hands on that. But then, who would have been suspicious of her? Who indeed? Dear dead Dumbledore? Not likely. Harry 'Two Short Planks' Potter? Never. Ron Weasley or Hermione Granger might have seen what was coming, but they were far too wrapped up in themselves and in Harry Potter's Ego Circus. It was almost too easy, except that she had done too much work for it to have gone wrong. The witch smiled to herself.

'Only the good die young

All the evil seem to live forever'

Forty-four minutes went quickly when you were having fun, she thought. She would have to remember that fact in future though: taking too much pleasure in gloating was not always a good idea. Sixteen minutes left to do what she had to do, she switched off the iPod, sixteen minutes, an apparation and a short sprint, and no-one would ever know that she had gone.

Chapter 11

Tits. Harry Potter was thinking.

Ginny's tits.

Tits.

Jenny Agutter's tits.

Now that was something that was wrong. There she was, in The Railway Children, taking off her red petticoat to stop the train so that it didn't crash. And there she was in An American Werewolf in London, taking off her top so that that werewolf bloke could see her tits. It was just too much. It had spoilt his childhood for him. Honestly.

Talking of werewolves, Harry decided to give Lupin a ring.

'Hey, dude. How's things.'

'Things are cool, but listen, I can't talk now guy. Tonks is sticking her tits in my face.'

'Hey, that's cool. That sounds like fun.'

'You'd think, wouldn't you.'

'I am, thinking. A lot. I might have to go now. I need a piss.'

'Really. Dude, you're foul. Speak soon, yeah?'

'Yeah. Speak soon.'

Chapter 12

'Hey there,' said the ptoad. 'Let's rewind a chapter for a second. I'm pretty sure that was my idea. I wrote a book about it twenty years ago. I did.'

Rowlingessa Starchild's black eyes glinted darkly with malicious ecstasy. 'Uh, uh,' she said. 'You're my bitch now. And don't you forget it.' She looked darkly at the two zombies stumbling through the grand gothic arch of her castle's writing room's doorway. One carried a sterling silver tray piled high with pastries and sweetmeats and steak and kidney pies and all sorts of meat and a few kinds of potatoes and some fine English tea. The other brought a freshly laundered Harris Tweed suit. 'You wouldn't want to be like Mervyn and J.R.R. here now would you?'

'At least they're dead,' muttered the ptoad.

Chapter 13

'Lord Voldemort,' said Draco Malfoy. Have you read this book?'

'What book's that,' Voldemort asked his newest disciple.

Draco held up the cover to show his lord. 'It's by this guy called David Icke, It's got some amazing ideas in it.'

'Oh for fuck's sake,' Voldemort muttered.

'I mean, did you know that the Queen is actually a lizard?' Draco continued oblivious.

Chapter 14

Dressed in his finest Harris Tweed robes Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts stood at the front of the classroom basking in the eager, attentive gazes of his students. A shaft of sunlight caught the dappled grey streak of hair at his temple just so, reflecting an air of distinguished authority out onto the room, while the motes of dust that lazed playfully in the late summer beams subtextualised both the carefree innocence of childhood schooldays and the approachable good humour of the obviously astoundingly clever teacher these students had the blind fucking luck to have been gifted with.

Yes, yes, yes. The sentence does work.

The 1930s.

Sorry, just daydreaming a little bit there. It's this tweed suit, it makes me confused. I try to be all progressive, and modern and feminist and progressive, but, well I just can't do it. Its just not my style. Either of my styles.

And it smells of wee – something to do with the dying process.

And the time I drank too much port.

'So,' said Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts, 'to start. We're going to look at the very essence of protection, at the very beginnings of what you can do to ward yourself from evil, before you even wave a wand, we're going to look at what the forces you intend to conjure really are, and what sort of mindset you need to have to conjure them well.'

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts turned from the class to draw on the board behind him. When he had finished he turned back around and asked 'who can tell me what this symbol here is?'

A hand shot up in the middle of the class, while the rest of the students looked shifty.

'Yes,' said Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts, 'Ms Ranger, isn't it? Of Ravenclaw?'

A great mass of hair nodded itself enthusiastically.

'Go on then,' encouraged Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts.

'It's a pentagram, sir,' the child said.

'Almost,' smiled Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts. 'The name pentagram is usually used to denote the downward pointing star, although there are many who wish to reclaim it for this, upward pointing form, with its more peaceful associations. However, when it is enclosed within the circle as I have drawn it, it becomes more properly a pentacle. The most basic symbol, and indeed mindstate, required for magical protection.

'Because, as you will come to see in our later lessons, all the symbols that we draw are in fact-even though the link seems mind-snappingly inaccessible-simultaneously states of mind. It is in this synchronicity that the spell is cast, in this bending of the mind to the symbol that the world is bent to the mind in turn, that the triumvirate reality of concrete-abstract-will is synchronised beneficially, neatly and without harm. To any party.

'Unless that's what you want, of course.'

About half of the class stared open-mouthed at their teacher, that would have been the Hufflepuffs because we're really into stereotyping here, while the other half, the Ravenclaws, took studious notes.

Shit no. They all just listened as best they could, except for a few who doodled, or made notes, or did all the other shit that kids do in school.

'So,' said Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts after taking a moment to get his breath back and look at the effect that his speech had had on the students. 'One of the most interesting things about the pentagram, and that's the star itself I'm talking about now, is what its supposed to represent. Of course, with the point down it has been claimed that it looks like a goat, and thus was taken on by the Satanists, allowing the Christian church to effectively demonise any party that had a prior claim to the symbol. However the goat is merely a good shorthand for the virility of the male, and the downward point is representative of the penis.

'Meanwhile, the upward pointing star is most often claimed by modern Wicca movements. The upward point is the positive ascendant, the reach for higher things. This way they seek to preclude any possible accusation of Satanism, but with their religiously necessary masculine/feminine dichotomy they defeat themselves. The goat becomes the male, destructive, even satanic force in the way that satanic was originally used – as the enemy and the aggressor – while the upward point is necessarily female.

'But what sort of female? With her arms out and her legs open wide she is the spread-eagle of male fantasy, not the powerful force of life that the religion requires. The spread-eagle in fact of satanic sacrifice. And so the circle comes round again. And meanwhile we can see the downward pointing pentagram, the essential V inherent in its design, as signifying the female vulva and womb.'

By now the first year students arrayed before the pacing Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts really were just sitting there staring at him. It reminded him of a class he had given at Harvard University, only last term.

Actually, it didn't remind him of any classes he had given at Harvard University. All of the classes he had given at Harvard University he had been so obsessed with seeming clever that he had forgotten the most important aspect of theology and religious history – that no one ever knew for sure. Symbols were never only one thing, they never meant only one thing and that thing alone, because they belonged to people and people changed. Two different groups in two different places at two different times might have both used the same set of lines, the same geometric shapes, to convey two different ideas. Other ideas were hijacked for political purposes, and then hijacked again, and in the end even the people who thought they were returning to the origins of an idea were only re-inventing it for their own time. And the best he could do was to observe the process and try to claim as much sense as he could from the mess.

It did remind me of a class I once attended though. It was when I was still at school, all those years ago. That's 'I' as in I, I, I – the original me who's writing this, the author of all of these authors, if you do the maths. I went to an all-boys school and, in the final year of A-levels, to fill up some of the free periods that we had, we did a thing called liberal studies. Which consisted of putting us in a classroom with whatever teacher didn't have anything better to do.

One set of lessons, on art history, were programmed, with this amazing bloke called Jan Piggott, who as far as I am aware is still going strong and being paid to do little more than sit in a room above the library jealously guarding his secrets. He claims to be a very strong Christian. I kind of believe him. He showed us some slides of some pictures he liked, it wasn't a very rigorous syllabus or anything, and told us a little bit about what each picture was, and why he liked it, or why it was important, or just why he had picked it out of the cupboard that morning. About half of the class just went to sleep, more fool them, but no-one really cared about that.

I watched. I like art.

And then he got to a picture of a young woman identified as the Daughter of Hell.

All boys school, remember.

The daughter of Hell didn't have any clothes on. More worryingly, in the words of our Dr Piggott, 'as you can see, she has wolves coming out of her vagina.'

There were about three of them, pulling their way out, violently yes, but not bloodily, if you know what I mean. It was violent, but it wasn't a picture about pain. We just stared, open mouthed pretty much.

'Its a very horrible picture,' Dr Piggott said. 'Quite horrible. Quite blasphemous. I don't like it at all.' But the way he said it, it was with a gleam in his eye, it was as if he really did like it, somewhere deep in his youth. Even if he didn't like what it represented, the reasons it had been painted, any of that.

It was there, though. Somewhere deep in his youth. And that was how I learnt something about what art is. Although you can't tell anyone else.

Chapter 15

Shitflaps.

(If in doubt, swear – humour maxim #1).

Chapter 16

Autumn stole upon the castle slowly, like the death of a loved one from a slow-acting but inevitably fatal virus. The sunny summer days wasted away with a momentum that was at first imperceptible, allowing a sense of security to permeate the hallowed halls of wizardly learning, but was in its final effects, unavoidable.

Warm, balmy evenings, the last of their kind for a great long while, found Harry Potter and his friends stretched out beneath the trees idly watching life go. In the distance, they watched as Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom shouted and gestured at a bunch of students. The students were from all four houses - Harry could tell by the coloured swatches that they had attached to the left shoulder of their otherwise uniform robes - and they seemed to be well drilled. Harry had watched this spectacle frequently over the last few weeks.

'I wonder what they're doing?' he said.

Hermione shook her head mournfully, Ron just continued to stare blankly.

'They're training,' Ginny said.

'Are they? But there's Slytherins among them. And stuff.'

'I know, dear. It's difficult isn't it.'

'But it was my thing. And I didn't want any Slytherin involved.'

'It hurts, doesn't it,' said Ginny. 'When things don't go your way. When people think that you're no good just because of who you are.'

'Yeah, but it was my idea.'

'And you never used it, Harry,' said Hermione. 'Let them do their thing. It's theirs now. Who knows, the DA may come in useful sometime.'

'Not with any of those Slytherin scum,' said Harry. 'I don't trust them.'

'We know you don't,' said Ginny.

'Hermione,' said Ron suddenly, whose current technique for dealing with Harry's more extremist views was to ignore what he said and try to start a conversation about something else. Hermione thought this very weak-willed, and Ron was sure that this was one of the reasons she was still holding out on him, but then again Harry was a mate. And it wasn't like _she_ ever took him to task anymore. She had told Ron that she was close to giving up on Harry, which was a shame, she admitted, but these things happen.

People don't always stay friends with the people they meet in year seven, Hermione had told him a couple of nights ago as they shared a pot of coffee in the prefect's common room before they began their evening patrols - a couple of her muggle friends had gone through the same thing. It was sad, but people grew up in different ways, and Harry really had been getting insufferable recently – never letting anyone else know what he was doing, never listening to what anyone else said and just filled with hatred for anyone who wasn't him.

'Yes Ron?' Hermione said.

'Do you know how to cook?' Ron asked.

'What do you mean?'

'It's just that I don't, and no-one's ever told me how. Or like, I don't know how I'd go about applying for a job, or budgeting my money when I got one, all the practical stuff that I thought I would know by now. When we leave school next year, we're going to have to do all that stuff by ourselves and well, I wouldn't know where to start.'

'But we're going to be Aurors, aren't we?' said Harry. 'We both got into Slughorn's potions class so we're well away, just as long as we scrape through the exams.'

'But mate, we still have to apply, they don't just come up to you and say – "you, you're hard. Come fight dark wizards".'

'They do, to me at least,' said Harry. 'Remember last year, when Percy came over to the Burrow for dinner that time, Scrimgeour wanted me to come work for the ministry then. But I said that I didn't want to work for him, that I was Dumbledore's man.'

'Well, then you've got it sorted, haven't you?' said Ron. 'I still don't have a clue what to do. My dad says that a lot of muggles go to a place called university, where they learn how to live a proper life and stuff, but we can't do that.'

'That's not even quite right,' said Hermione. 'University is a place where people go to continue studying. I've been applying for a few myself.'

'You what?' said Ron.

'I suppose I should have mentioned it before, but it never seemed like the right time. I'm going to do a course in physics I think, there's a special scheme where I can do a foundation year and catch up on all the stuff that I've missed out on.'

'Why would you want to do that?' asked Ginny incredulously. 'You're a witch now, you don't have to go back to the muggle world.'

'The muggle world is still where I'm from,' said Hermione stiffly. 'And there's a lot of very clever, very interesting people at work there. That's one of the things that... well I don't want to say hate because it's the world that all of you guys come from and love, but I do get annoyed by about magical people. We're too happy just to get by, to use our magic to keep us in the comfort zone, and not actually see what's really going on. For instance, do you guys know why things fall down?'

'Cos they do?' ventured Ron. 'Its obvious isn't it. They just fall, cos they're heavy and stuff.'

'No Ron,' Hermione said. 'Things fall because of gravity, which is a force that attracts anything with mass together. All objects in the universe are affected by it, bound together fundamentally. Isn't that amazing? I don't want to stop learning, to let a whole collection of knowledge pass me by because I can make myself disappear at will. I want to know why I can disappear. What happens to the pieces of matter that make up my body and if I'm the same person when I get put back together again.'

'I don't know,' said Ron. 'Maybe it is interesting, but I want to do things, more than anything. I think we're privileged, even us Weasleys, as poor as we are, we're better off than probably the richest muggle – in practical terms, so we should,' he turned onto his elbow and looked at Hermione, 'we should make the most, see as much of the world as we can. Its like an obligation. We have to use everything that life throws at us.'

'That's exactly what I'm saying, Ron.' Hermione shifted against the tree. 'And I'm going to use the things I've been given to really make a difference, to really push back the boundaries of knowledge, both muggle knowledge and magical knowledge...'

She fixed Ron with a hard stare. 'Do you mind, though... that I'm going to go-'

'I could be a pirate I suppose,' said Harry. He put his arm around Ginny conspicuously. 'Do you reckon that if I killed Voldemort they would let me be an Auror without passing any of my exams? I could be the maverick, who's always getting shouted out by the commissioner but who always gets the crooks, like Eddy Murphy in Beverly Hills cop.' Harry started speaking in a strange, not exactly American accent. 'Don't start with me chief, I know I didn't do it by the book, but if I had the O'Neill gang would still be outer there on the streets selling crack to eleven year olds. Don't you tell me what's right, I know what's right and taking down O'Neill was god-damn right by me.'

And there's more... Follow the link in my profile. All good things.


	2. Part 2

Chapter 17

'I don't care if you think that you're a police officer, you can fuck right off out of my office and stop telling me how I should or shouldn't run my school.' Professor McGonagall was shouting.

'That's the job of the minister for magic,' Hooch added slyly.

'And I'd fucking tell him to fuck off too,' McGonagall raved.

'Excuse me, am I interrupting something?' asked Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts, entering the office. The stunningly beautiful and frighteningly intelligent professor Minerva McGonagall stopped pacing and looked up at him. Next to her the amazingly attractive and startlingly clever Madam Hooch suppressed a girlish giggle of amusement. In front of them the object of McGonagall's anger defiantly stood her ground. She was obviously highly gifted in many... Wait a minute, Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts held back his thoughts for a second to do a double take. Was that a beard? It looked like one, if an ethereal one. A spiritual beard.

'Ms Next was just leaving,' McGonagall said icily.

'That's Officer Thursday Next of Jurisfiction to you,' the other woman said 'And I am not going until you have agreed to the changes in curriculum as required.'

That's funny, Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts thought. Her voice seems to be that of a man too, not in terms of acoustics, but just in the way it sounds...

McGonagall idly took out her wand and began to twiddle it between her fingers. 'I assure you that you are going, young lady. I do not take orders from people who associate with _that_ kind of punnery.'

'Professor, respectfully, this is an order from the Council of Genres direct. This is not something that you can just ignore. These children need to learn basic life skills, you have a duty of care.'

'Listen,' McGonagall said flatly. 'I care for my children my own way. And as it is there are enough different books running about in this story for its own good already, and I don't want yours muscling its way in uninvited. I didn't like it, I think that you are a Mary Sue, or a Gary Stu or whatever, and just because you have this parasitic world that claims access to all of the rest of us fictions, don't think that we want you here. Now go.'

'You have not heard the last of this,' Next started. 'There is power-'

'In bad gags and bad writing? I don't think so.' Quick as a Mexican gunslinger, maybe even Eli Wallach, McGonagall flourished her wand. 'Nullus Personis,' she spat and all of a sudden the police officer had never even been there in the first place.

'I think that you just wiped out everything Jasper Fforde ever wrote,' Hooch whispered. 'What with all of the connections that those books contain.'

'Ooops,' said McGonagall. 'How careless.'

Chapter 18

The black car slid through the velvety darkness of night, like a patch of solid shade. Except for the Hi-beams and the hazard lights. But still, it was very velvety. Snape stared out at the unseen alpine scenery that passed him in the dark, surprised that the car had still not reached its destination, yet troubled more by the thoughts which kept circling his mind like sharks: sleek, dark and never able to stop swimming.

Chapter 19

'So, what are you actually doing here, Professor?' McGonagall asked.

'I need to check the archives,' Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts said, 'I am curious about a book which I found in my study, and I would like to check out its earlier editions. To test a theory, so to speak.'

'I don't suppose that that will be a problem,' McGonagall said. 'You do know that the archives are kept in an impossibly difficult to access set of vaults, with all sorts of time delays and stuff, and only about enough oxygen for half an hour, in quite exceptionally claustrophobic little plastic rooms set within the vast dungeon. And I think there might be some laser grids down there as well.'

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts knew that this might be a problem, because of his intense fear of enclosed spaces, the only fear he actually had, that had come about through a very hazily hinted at, underdeveloped, childhood trauma – when he had fallen down a hole. However, because he was so hard, and cool, he didn't want to mention that this might be a problem. As much as anything because he was used to completely ignoring his own back story at any given moment anyway.

'Oh, and you'll have to wade through Dumbledore's collection of pornography as well.'

'Not a problem,' said Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts.

'Wait until you see it,' said McGonagall darkly.

'Furries,' Madam Hooch said with a low wonderment. 'Hundreds of furries.'

Chapter 20

Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny were gathered in the Gryffindor common room.

'Are we ready then,' said Hermione. 'Because I think that I've located the next horcrux. Hufflepuff's cup.'

'What?' said Harry. 'Oh yeah, horcruxes. I was wondering when you were going to start locating them.'

'I got bored of waiting for you to, Harry,' Hermione countered.

'I got distracted, ok?'

'From hunting down the wizard who killed your parents?'

'No,' said Harry, pronouncing it with spectacular petulance. It looked like the Caps Lock light might be coming on very soon.

'Look,' Ron said, muscling in on the squabble before it could erupt fully. 'Voldemort hasn't made a move in months, which means that he's either planning something big, or he's waiting to see what we do. The problem is, that he holds the upper hand, his is the default win. If we do nothing, then Voldemort survives, as no-one other than Harry can kill him. Are you following me?'

Three heads nodded as one.

'The advantage that we have,' Ron continued, 'is that Voldemort doesn't see it this way at all, on previous form. He wants Harry dead, completely gone, so as to remove the threat I suppose. This in spite of the fact that he has his body and his powers back in full, and that it was Dumbledore who was pursuing the horcruxes, now eliminated by Snape.'

'WHO I WILL KILL!' shouted Harry.

'Yes, quite,' said Hermione, wiping spittle from her eye.

'Seen as we haven't made a move on the horcruxes yet,' Ron continued his continuing, 'Voldemort may feel that we never will.'

'In short?' Ginny asked disdainfully.

'We have no strategic information, and we desperately need to get some.' Ron stated 'The best way to do this is to make a cautious move against our enemy and to monitor any reaction. This means that instead of spending this afternoon's free periods titting about like wankers, we're going to go for a stroll. Would you believe it, but the next horcrux is only in the bloody Shrieking Shack.'

'Apparently Tom Riddle used the old place as a shag palace as well,' Hermione said.

'Explain?' asked Harry.

'When we're moving,' she replied.

'Right then everyone,' Harry said. 'Suited and booted are we?'

'Locked and cocked and ready to roll.'

The 1960's tarmac footpath that led from Hogwarts school of Witches and Wizardry and Magical Stuff to the small Danish village of Hogsmeade in the Scottish valleys of north-west Europe had been set in the 'Clifton' style of slightly convex surface bordered by wood tramelling with a half-ton 'Magimix', one-man big, hot, flattening thing. Although less popular than the 'Armstrong' style, its kind could still be found linking the facilities in many a children's playground in the southern reaches of the country. The party of young heroes that traversed its length, which at a walking pace might take one an even three-quarters of an hour, comprised two witches and two wizards, bold in... no that's wrong. The party should have had a fine and noble Warrior, an Elven mage, her untrustworthy but useful companion the Halfling thief. With maybe a wise Cleric to bring his stout justice to the fray. Or is that the wrong book?

Oh yeah, shit, I'm looking at my TSR guidelines here.

'Oooh, I'm a Dark Elf, but actually I'm really nice, and all the other Dark Elves hate me.'

Shut up you twat, you're still defining your entire self against the outmoded eugenicist, brain-pan measuring anthropology of intrinsic racial characteristics. Like evil. Come on, give me something interesting to chew on.

And like, what happened to the hardcore feminism of Outhbound, that was a great book. Now I have to put up with detailed descriptions of the damage caused to bird anatomy? And how long it takes to fucking heal? Give me a break.

And I'm not even going to start talking about the fucking wheel of time.

The four magical children sat in the saloon bar of the Three Broomsticks, sipping their drinks and edging away from the crazy man at the bar, who was holding court at Madame Rosmerta. (Who, incidentally, was thinking, _what did I do to deserve this?_ and then, _Oh yes, that_, followed by, _but I was under the Imperius curse_, which eventually reached the same, _oh yes_, because there was _that_ as well.) Sunbeams tore through the dusty atmosphere and caught the dancing motes in a fiery golden tableau. The smell of ancient varnish, stale smoke and sawdust boiled up from the heated wood of the tables and filled out their noses uncomfortably.

'So you're saying that Hufflepuff's heir was at school at the same time that Slytherin's was,' Harry was saying. It had been his idea for them to repair to the pub for a little Dutch courage before the fight. And as everyone knows, adventures always start in a tavern anyway.

'It's not that unlikely,' said Hermione.

'But you're telling me that they were boffing as well?' Harry spurted incredulously.

'These things happen,' Hermione continued evenly. 'It's not uncommon in the boarding-school environment. Close proximity and all that.'

'But Riddle was a freakazoid,' Harry complained.

'A powerful one though, a lot of people find power attractive. How else would Bill Clinton have got the interns sucking his cigar?'

'Bill who?'

'Never mind. the point is, they used to do their shagging out here, in the shrieking shack, so that no-one would know – or maybe just because she liked to feel the wind or something, there's no accounting for taste. And Voldemort, like the trophy bagging chauvinist shit that he is, seems to have thought that it would be well funny to put the horcrux he made out of Hufflepuff's cup in the spot where he used to, shall we say, sample her wine.'

'Alright troops,' said Harry draining his glass. 'Let's move out.'

As the walked up the (front-garden) path toward the ominously looming shack of shrieking, Ron tailed behind with Hermione. He spoke to her in a low, urgent voice: 'There's something more to that story, something that you didn't want to tell Harry, I'm sure of it.'

'You're right, Ron,' Hermione said. 'But I hope that you'll understand why. Its something that may not be true, and I sincerely hope that it isn't. Harry works best on the spur of the moment, every time he's had all of the facts in advance he's cocked it all up, so if what I dread is true, then I want our illustrious leader to react, not act, because otherwise we haven't got a chance.'

'What's you're worry?'

'That the grail that Harry saw in Voldemort's memory was not a relic of Hufflepuff's at all. It was just a piece of silver plated tin tat that a batty old woman had convinced herself was a relic of a bygone age. I have a horrible feeling that Hufflepuff's cup means something else entirely. Something more metaphorical. I sincerely hope that I am wrong, because the consequences of that thought are too horrible to imagine, but even so, I do not doubt that the horcrux will be guarded.'

'Hurry up you two,' Harry called from the shack's entrance. 'Let's do this thing.'

The four entered the spooky building. Despite the strength of the late afternoon sunlight that fell on its outer walls it was only a murky gloom shot through with cold and dusty spikes of blinding brightness that penetrated the buildings filth-caked windows and misaligned timber walls. The sparsely furnished interior was picked out in chiaroscuro blacks and greys, everything hidden under a layer of dust and the disarray they had caused four years ago was itself undisturbed. This disconcerted them even more. Harry took the lead, his wand drawn, as Hermione said 'I think that there is an upstairs to this place that we haven't yet seen.'

'Has no-one seen it since Voldemort used it as his love palace?' Ginny asked.

'Not if he put the kind of charm on the door that I think he did,' Hermione replied. 'Lumos,' she said, waving her wand so that it cast its own eerie light.

'Lumos,' the other three said in unison.

'Now, Ginny,' Hermione said under her breath, 'as the resident Elf, would you like to search for traps?'

'What does that mean?' Ginny asked.

'Nothing,' Hermione said. 'Just my little joke. Everyone always wants to be the fucking Elf. Right, I hope that I've got this right.' Hermione pulled two tiny pouches out of her robes. 'Talc and silver. Here we go.' Hermione began to chant in an occult tongue. As she did so she took a pinch of powder from each pouch and sprinkled them into the air in front of her where they seemed to hang in suspension, intertwining as the words flowed through them. A tension filled the air, as if something might crack that was held in place only by Hermione's will. At the last minute, when all seemed almost lost, Hermione relented. She traced a symbol with her wand through the floating powders and shouted out the words '_try'kletha hagthaar slup_,' and the world segued suddenly back into place. The powder before Hermione glowed greenish blue and formed itself into a mist of power that swirled, searching, through the room. In a far corner it seemed to find what it had been looking for and it raced into itself, coalescing and then vanishing in a bright burst of light.

And where there had been nothing before, now a staircase stood that led up to the second floor of the building. Sweat stood out on Hermione's brow, but she looked relieved.

'What did you do?' asked Ginny.

'Cast _Detect Invisibility,_' Hermione replied. 'It's ritual magic I found in an old book from the 80s. But that staircase had been hidden for a long time, and the power that hid it was immense.'

'Well, what are we waiting for?' Harry half shouted. 'Let's get up there, get that horcrux and melt it down for scrap.'

'After you, dear leader,' Hermione gestured.

Harry bounded up the stairs, kicked the door down SAS style and-

'HOLY FREAKIN' BALLS,' he shouted as the grey and desiccated looking arm almost tore his head off. Harry rolled into the room under the creatures reach and it turned round to face him. The other three ran up the stairs after him and then stopped short, staring at the leprous, walking corpse that was Brunhild Helgasdottir, last heir of Hufflepuff, as she bore down upon Harry Potter. There was a light of intelligence in her eyes, but it was so horribly twisted, so downtrodden and desperate in its captivity, that they could not bear to look upon her.

'Sectumsempra.' Harry shouted, brandishing his wand. A great gash suppurated stickily across her chest, but no blood welled out from it. Brunhild laughed at her dry veins and ploughed her fist into Harry's chest, driving him back to the floor and almost crushing his ribs. Harry gasped for breath and his hand reached out instinctively, grabbing for help.

'Hey, ugly.' Ginny shouted. 'Get yo' hands off my man.'

The corpse turned slowly to eye the newcomers. 'Hah,' it spat. 'He is not your man, nor will he ever be.' It spoke with a curious double voice, The voice of Brunhild overlaid with the voice of Voldemort. 'He is mine to kill,' the horcrux continued. 'He has always been such. The prophecy was made. So it be spoken, so it be done.'

On the floor, Harry's groping hand found edge of something cold, metal wrapped in leather, hidden beneath a discarded burlap sack. He edged himself toward it and found that it was something he could grip. Like the hilt of a sword.

'Wait,' said the horcrux, looking more closely at Ginny. 'I know you, I was you once, long ago. You are not so unlike-'

'JUST FUCKING DIE,' Harry screamed, swinging the sword up from beneath the sack and in an arc over his head. It caught the creature on its shoulder on the downswing, cleaving inward through its lungs and heart. The massive trauma was too much for even the withered body to stand, for it was still alive and not truly undead. It crumpled to the floor, the part of it that was Voldemort dying first with a withering scream of rage and disappointment. As it lay on the floor, the part that had been Brunhild disappeared as well, a thankful look filling her eyes, as if she was waking from a dream. 'I have found the rest of me, now,' she said. 'They could not hold me apart for long, for I do not belong here. Goodbye.'

Harry looked at the weapon that he held, now limply, in his hand.

'Gryffindor's fucking sword,' Harry said. 'It always seems to turn up just when it's needed.'

Chapter 21

'Every time I go to one of these fucking auditions it's like a piece of me dies,' Voldemort spat. He slammed the motel door shut and slumped into the big chair.

'I take it that you did not get the part, sire?' Lucius Malfoy asked in a smooth way that really wasn't a question.

'No, I did not get the fucking part, Lucius. I didn't even get a 'we'll call you' as I was leaving the stage.'

'"We'll all go to Hollywood," he says,' Lucius mumbled to himself. '"We'll all become famous and live for ever," he says.'

'Shut up, Lucius, and get me a beer,' Voldemort snapped. 'Don't these people know talent? I'm a classically trained actor.'

'There are no beers, sire,' Lucius said.

'No beers? Why the hell not? What about a brandy or a glass of port. I'll even drink some of that dodgy Schnapps that we got at the airport in Spain.'

'We do not have any of it left. Sire,' Lucius continued in an infuriatingly smooth style. 'We do not have any money.'

'Would you stop talking in that stupid, superior tone,' Voldemort ranted from his seat. 'For fuck's sake, you really know how to push my buttons, don't you? What about Draco's diner job? What about the money he's making there?'

'That covers our rent, sire. Nothing else. It's just not fair that he should be looking after you when it was your responsibility to look after us all.' Lucius looked over to his son, who cowered in the corner of the room, ostensibly reading a book about conspiracies. Lucius went over and sat down next to the young man, putting his arm protectively around his shoulder. 'It's ok, son,' Lucius said. 'We're just having a discussion. It's about adult things, so nothing for you to worry about.' Looking back up toward Voldemort, Lucius said: 'We still do not have enough money for food.'

'And whose fucking fault is that then? Both Narcissa and Bellatrix got call backs for _Draculess: I Vant To Suck Your Cock_, if they'd gone through with that I could have taken you all out for a slap up meal at Wendy's, but no, they had to be too fucking precious.'

'Do not speak to us like that.' Lucius drew himself up.

Voldemort stood, raving. 'I'll teach you to answer back,' he shouted, balling his fist as his eyes started to cloud over. Draco drew back further into the wall behind his father. And then something cleared in Voldemort's face. 'Ahh, fuck this,' he spat. 'I'm going out.' And he stalked through the door and slammed it hard enough to shake the wall.

Silence crept back into the room. The air felt burnt, somehow blistered, with a taste that the humming air-conditioners could not remove. Lucius relaxed, still staring at the door.

'Dad,' Draco whispered.

'Yes, son,' Lucius said, remembering himself. 'What is it?'

'I've been reading this book,' Draco continued, growing more confident with each word. 'And apparently there's this secret conspiracy, of the rich, and like those who went to certain schools and stuff, and they make all the decisions. And they always make sure that they keep the power for themselves. I think that it's really interesting.'

'Yes, it is interesting, Draco,' Said Lucius. 'Because the people you're talking about there. That's us.'

'Really.'

'Yes, really. We've held power for a very long time, through money and favours and knowing the right sort of handshake, and there's nothing that's going to take it away from us either. You'll be part of that too, you know?'

'Will I?' Draco wondered.

'Yes, you will.'

Chapter 22

'I was right,' exclaimed Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts. 'I knew that if I dug deep enough I would find it. It was lucky I had that really expendable squad of marines as well. That laser grid was really nasty. Really nasty indeed. The way it cut people up into little cubes and stuff, that all slid apart in a big gloopy mess of gore. But it doesn't matter, because I have the answer.

'Or some of it at least.'

In the dark red light of the archives, in the cold air, Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts' breath steamed. In the confines of his little Perspex booth, the billowing mist that he blew out came back into his face and he momentarily remembered his claustrophobia. This darkness, this redness, the coldness and the barrenness and the lack of sound, it was like he was regressing, like he had been clawed and pulled backwards into his mother's womb. If he had had one. He shivered. The records clearly stated it, until 1976 Home Economics had been a major part of the school curriculum, but then they had been abolished. A note next to the entry read, 'Rsn: ttl Hse Elf subjgtn. achvd,' while a footnote referred to the complete destruction of all books held on the subject.

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts felt his mind working. It was a not unpleasant sensation. He put the archive back into its foolscap and filed it back into its teetering stack (tm). As he did so, in the confines of his Perspex box, his elbow jarred against another teetering stack (tm) of files, and a single manila folder fell to the floor. Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts picked it up and extracted its contents. It was a single photograph, that was upside down as he pulled it out so that the first thing Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts saw was the pencil inscription on the photo's matt back. It read: 'Plotus Devicius, killed during prologue.'

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts gasped, his curiosity piqued. This was what he had been brought here to solve. Or it wasn't, but he wanted it to be. He really liked it, and felt really popular when people wanted him to solve mysteries. he turned the photograph over. It was horrible.

It was a wizarding photograph, so it looped itself like an animated gif, but this was the kind of loop that would only be created by the most twisted individual. So, like, most livejournal users then. The picture showed a man with his guts ripped out, and had been taken just as a crow had flown in to scavenge from the viscera. As it pecked and then disappeared, to swoop in again, like some demented, diminutive Promethean almost-ran, the wizard moved in what must have been the final twitches of his life, arranging himself into a pose of mystical meaning, to ease his passage to the other side.

And the guts. They had been arranged, into some kind of cryptogram, or a word, but a word in a language that Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts had never seen before in his life. It looked like this:

This image has been removed due to the fact that if anyone with half a brain saw it they would guess the entire rest of the plot. Incompatibility error 344. If you have any questions, please email the webmaster.

Chapter 23

Ginny sat about. It was the depths of winter: a little bit of time has passed since the last chapter, obviously. It's not like there's any kind of link between the two. It was cold and everything sucked. Well, actually, I suppose it didn't all suck for her, but it was a bit cold, and that wasn't nice. I just wanted to mention her. Though. Just, like because, you know. So there she was. Feeling cold.

Maybe Harry will come along and warm her up, put a bit of cheer in that heart. That might be sweet of him. Maybe he won't. Who knows. I don't think it matters all that much, though.

Chapter 24

Outside the snow fell, creating a blanket of quiet across the castle grounds. Two sets of footprints led into the forest. The one that was supposed to be scary and full of evil, dark thoughts, biblical intimations of knowledge and other erotic metaphors.

'Do you remember when we used to be scared of this place?' Ron asked.

'There's still a lot to be scared of, Ron,' Hermione replied. 'It's just that we've got most of the tools to deal with it.'

The weak sunlight was cut into strips by the bare branches of the trees, thrusting like dead-hand defiance into the sky. It lit their faces and seared the gap between them.

'Most of?'

'Yeah, most of.'

'So, you reckon, you could make a good fist of it?' Ron persisted. 'If we got lost, got in too far.'

'I reckon,' Hermione said, without sounding too sure.

They walked a bit further, the snow crunching beneath their boots. Ron suddenly thought about the spiders, running wild without the one that Hagrid had called his pet, but quelled himself. This was not the time or the right part of the woods to be bringing that up. The woods were very large and they'd known Hagrid long enough to have a good understanding of the bits each inhabitant viewed as its own and which were the bits where a human would be undisturbed if he ventured inside.

Hermione waited for the textual digression to finish overrunning its course before she continued.

'You know what,' Hermione sighed, her breath billowing out in a great cloud of rolling vapour that disappeared into the frozen air. 'I reckon I could.'

She reached out her arm and took hold of Ron's hand. Neither looked at what she had done, as if it might break a delicate magical spell, but they walked a little lighter on the snow. The sun didn't sear their skin at all.

'I had a thought,' Ron said. 'If we're here, in P.O.V. then where's Harry?'

Chapter 25

'I'm Harry Potter. La La La. Look at me, look at me. I'm Harry Potter. La La La.'

'Thank you, Ron,' Hermione said, somewhere far away. 'That was very noble of you.'

'Yes, Harry,' Ginny said. 'I know who you are. Now get back down here.'

Chapter 26

'What a tawdry story,' said Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts.

'I know,' replied the Giant Squid. 'But you've got to admit that it's funny.'

'I am under no such obligation,' Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts blustered huffily back.

'Don't act so high and mighty, just because I beat you at the Game of Knowledge.'

'It's not my fault I don't know anything about sport.' Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts ground his teeth. 'Why can't we play poker while the Bridge Club is on holiday, you said that some of the guys might be around this week.'

'I thought that they might, but you know how it is. Great Cthulhu drank so much last time he came out that there's no way he's waking until the Earth shifts on its axis and all the stars are realigned.'

'And Prince Adam?'

'Baking spice bread. The p-'

'Yeah, alright. I get the picture. You don't want to invite any of your friends over.'

'That's not true.' This time it was the giant squid's turn to sound cheesed off. 'You can't just blame me because all of your ladies have got families to visit over Christmas. It's a stupid ceremony anyway, for a stupid weak dead god who sacrificed himself for your ungrateful lot rather than stand up for himself. My god could eat your god for breakfast.'

'That's not nice,' Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts said flatly. 'You're just snapping now for the sake of snapping, and you know that he's not my god anyway. I've been touched by His Noodly Appendage and you invite _that_ wrath at your peril.'

The two stared out over the loch, the afternoon light glinting playfully from the waters. They were silent for while, watching the boats that constantly rounded on each other, firing great broadsides and bursts of grapeshot as they circled inexpertly though the almost still waters.

'How goes the ship war, then?' asked Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts.

'It's more of a naval battle, don't you think,' the giant squid attempted to correct.

'No,' Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts stated. 'I prefer the word ship war. I think that it's a better word.'

'Well, they're mainly taking pot-shots at each other. No-one ever really wins, do they,' the giant squid mused. 'Except,' it continued. 'The HMS Pumpkin Pie sank recently. We had a bit of a feast, then, I can tell you. Fangirl meat is very tender, you know. The strangest thing though, was that it didn't go down to enemy action at all. It was holed by an anvil, went straight through the decks and smashed out of the hull. Splintered a good bit of the keel too, she had no chance.'

'Where did an anvil come from, out here?'

'God knows. The sky? Like I say. God only knows.'

Chapter 27

Snape stared out of the window into the dark of nothing, the dark that contained only his fears and regrets, against which he was arrayed like a feeble speck of sand surrounded by the ocean. The black car continued its black journey, but there, in the distance, was the darkness turning to grey? Was that a hint of red? A new dawn? Nay. It is fire. Fire and darkness. Fire and death. Snape looked away from the window and into the body of the car, turning his back to the false dawn, the lie of the light. There was nothing here but darkness. The car drove onwards into the night.

Chapter 28

'What about Hagrid?' asked the ptoad. 'Lovable, stupid Detritu- Hagrid.'

'I haven't forgotten. I love all my characters equally. I wouldn't just phase a main character out of the story because I realised that they were a liability, a boring-to-write walking plot device and just a general mistake from start to finish.'

'Where is he then?'

'In the mountains. Fighting giants and stuff, like he has been for the last two books.'

'Oh.'

'See. I know everything.'

'And Hagrid is _so_ not ripped off from your books. Put a sock in it. I may have stole a lot of things, but I didn't steal him.'

Chapter 29

Hagrid hew about him with his mighty axe as the flames consumed the monastery. 'Take that, death eater scum,' he roared. 'You may hide yourself in the mountains, but Hagrid finds all!'

'_Ma siamo monace_,' a black-robed woman cried as she cowered before him. 'Nuns.'

'Cease your babbling, witch,' Hagrid bellowed, and he brought his axe down in a mighty arc that cleaved her in twain. And he laughed. He laughed at the destruction, for it emboldened his spirit. He was mighty. He was a warrior for good. He Was Hagrid.

Chapter 30

The Sword of Gryffindor is a 45 ½ inch long, single-tempered hand-and-a-half, or bastard, sword. Forged by the smith-god Weyland in the dark depths of time from a shard of iron pulled out of the roots of the world ash Ygdrasil and first quenched in the blood of the Jotun, its blade is decorated with the legendary exploits of Thor, mightiest and bravest of the gods. Its blade has remained sharp ever since its forging while its balance is so perfect that it has been said to almost leap in front of its wielder's enemy's blows and to riposte as if with a mind of its own. (Is this too much?) In other words, it was a non-magical sword +1.

This may explain why a weedy twelve year old was able to use a sword that was almost as big as he was. The bastard sword itself, so called because it can be used either one- or two-handed, and so is neither one thing nor the other but a bastardised mixture, and not because you have to be a real hard bastard to use one, has long been the weapon of choice amongst fantasy heroes. Despite the fact that they are really tough to use and really expensive to make, everyone from Hawk the Slayer to the Beastmaster has used one, so why shouldn't Harry?

After many years of its use, as recorded in the mighty prose sagas and eddas of the Hebridian Vikings, the sword was eventually entrusted to the wizard Godric Gryffindor, whose own name is believed to be a distortion or derivation of the word 'Thor', who added to its already inimitable charms a bunch of his own. He enchanted it to become a sword +4, defender. Earning himself a tidy sum of experience points in the process and thus bringing him up to the level 10 required to join the other three in his party in their school-building endeavour.

This may also explain why Harry was able to even lift the thing. God, I'm getting tired already and I haven't even done a page of this stuff. And this tweed is getting really hot. My editor says that this is a really good way to fill up space and to keep all of the nerds happy, but... Oh, lets just get on with it.

Since Gryffindor's original enchantment, the sword has had a further influx of magical power, and is currently an intelligent weapon with a charisma of 13, an intelligence of 12 and a wisdom of 11. It communicates through empathy and has the following powers, granting the user free use of evasion and free use of uncanny dodge (as a 5th-level Barbarian) as well as allowing the user to Detect thoughts (100-ft. range, 1 minute per use) 3 times a day, but it will not always allow the wielder to know about or have free access to these abilities. Its alignment is- oh, fuck this. I don't care if this is how most people write thrillers, with endless, tedious descriptions of weaponry. I'm going to make a cup of tea.

Chapter 31

Harry wouldn't leave his sword alone. 'His' sword, as he now referred to it. He had got himself a sword belt and scabbard and he wore this all day as he marched about the school. 'Constant vigilance,' he called it. He said that he was always ready for the attack, when it came. They had infiltrated the school before, and they could do so again, and Harry was adamant that they would not get to Ginny. He had to protect her, so he said, because she would always be in danger. Spiderman has many enemies, and so too does Harry P. He had to protect them all.

Chapter 32

'We're going for pizza,' Voldemort said.

Bellatrix looked up, bored, from the kitten that she held above the copper bowl, her knife paused against its throat.

'Come on,' Voldemort said.

Lucius muted the TV. 'Who's going to pay?' he asked.

'I'm doing a ritual,' Bellatrix moaned. Draco hoisted his book higher so that it covered his eyes.

'I'm going to pay,' Voldemort said, trying not to lose his enthusiasm. 'I got the job, so I'm going to treat us all. I know that I've not been the best, lately, but I think that things are really going to change now. I'm going to make the effort. And to apologise, I want to treat us. treat us all. As a family. Can't I do that?'

Chapter 33

Harry and Ron were playing wizarding Warhammer 40k. They'd progressed a bit from chess, you see. Harry's Space Wolf (naturally) army was being slowly overwhelmed by the superior tactics of Ron's Orc horde. Don't ask me how Ron was doing it, I've never been able to beat a Space Wolf player in my life. That was the most munchkinised army list I've ever seen.

Anyway. Enough of the author intervention. It's boring. The cup of tea was nice though.

Bollocks.

Chapter 33

Harry and Ron were playing wizarding chess, and Ron had the upper hand. As they played, Harry studied his friend, looking for signs of weakness. In doing so, he noticed for the first time the little stripes that adorned Ron's collar. When Ron noticed Harry staring he said: 'they still want you back, you know?'

Harry ignored him, silent for a second, and then he asked, 'what do those make you?'

'I'm a sergeant,' Ron said. 'And so is Hermione.'

'Only sergeant?' Harry asked dismissively.

'The structure's a little loose, Harry,' Ron said as he moved his piece. 'But I'm happy doing that, taking charge in the front line. They've split it into two regiments, I've got the 1st, with most of the old hands Bones, Bell, MacMillan, Smith, the Patils – who make a brilliant heavy support team – even Finnigan and Thomas are turning out to be top class marines. Hermione's in charge of 2nd regiment, our backup squad with some of the weaker hands. The Creaveys in close quarters spot, Spinnet on point, and the new members as well, Hudson, Apone, Vasquez, Drake and Spunkmeyer, Frost, Crowe and Weirbowski. She's doing a really good job of licking them into shape. But we really need you.'

'What about Neville?'

'He's the general. Luna's his trusted lieutenant.'

'I bet that he's really pleased with himself for that,' Harry said darkly. 'He's always wanted to be me. To be as good as me.'

'What are you saying, Harry?' Run spluttered. 'He wants you to be the commander. He wants you in charge.'

'What, he wants me to take his place on the hill? That's not Harry P. I need to be there, be in the thick of battle, smelling the blood of my enemies as I spill it with my own hand.'

'Harry, that's not what this is about. Neville isn't that sort of general anyway, he leads from the front, and he wants us there with him.'

Harry knew, somehow, suddenly, as his friend talked, the depth of Ron's despair at Harry's behaviour. The first glimmerings of distaste. Of disloyalty. And he marked them well. He knew too the next few moves that Ron would make on the chessboard, and he knew what he should do to crush this attack.

Chapter 34

'Thank you, my liege,' Lucius Malfoy said.

'That's ok,' Voldemort said. 'I wanted to treat us.'

'Well, it's appreciated. I know we've said things to each other in the past. But...'

'I understand, Lucius,' Voldemort said. 'And how are my special troopers doing,' he cried out as Draco, Bellatrix and Narcissa came back from the ice cream factory with their bowls piled high with silver balls and chocolate buttons, hundreds and thousands and all different kinds of syrups.

'This is brilliant,' Draco enthused. 'Thank you so much, uncle Voldemort.'

'Uncle Voldie,' Bellatrix said.

Narcissa watched her two charges indulgently, then she shifted her gaze to the two men who had remained seated and felt a frisson of excitement, imagining the spit-roast that she could look forward to this evening.

'Uncle Voldie,' Bellatrix continued, 'you never told us what your plan was, before. When you wanted to take over the world and kill off Harry Potter.'

'I know, Belly, I know,' The Dark Lord Voldemort said. 'It was, well, it was a passing thing. And it wasn't even about Potter. Not really.'

'No?'

'No, there was another prophecy. There's a hell of a lot of power there, at Hogwarts. And it's tied up for use in teaching the young.'

'Fat lot of use that,' Narcissa let slip.

'Exactly,' Voldemort said, letting his own gaze rest on Narcissa and then her husband, and himself thinking forward to the night that this display of largesse had bought him. 'That power could well be used by someone else. By me, I suppose. And I heard a prophecy, about how the power would be available only when the four founders had been turned against each other. Something about relics of the founders being used to destroy relics of the other founders. I'd had this in mind for a very long time, ever since I was a kid, it was even in my diary, and I'd done some of the work towards it already a few years ago. But, I suppose the idea wore off a bit. I've got a new purpose in life.'

'I love these chocolate frostings,' Draco said.

Chapter 35

Hagrid held his swollen man saber before him. Madame Maxine, her great orbs swollen with power... Hagrid lowered his sword and cleaved her in twain... I really can't write this. It's wrong.


	3. Part 3

Chapter 36

The witch checked herself. She had to be careful, an alibi was only an alibi when you hadn't been _seen_ at the other place. The place where _you weren't supposed to be_.

Her cloak was big and dark and generally considered to be the best kind of disguise. But even so, she wasn't sure: wasn't the best kind of disguise to just be another face in the crowd? and since when did she start having misgivings about her plans? Maybe it was the glass of sherry and the two glasses of mead. Maybe she should just get a good grip of herself.

The plan was going fine, the plan was going brilliantly in fact. She'd set things up perfectly, so perfectly that she'd hardly needed to use the device that nestled even now against her chest. Houses had been turned against houses, friends had been turned against friends, time had even been turned against time – or maybe that was going a little bit too far. Whatever.

It was all about symbols, 'symbology' as that moronic new teacher of theirs would have wrongly called it, that was all you needed. You didn't need a full on war between the houses, just a little symbol. A little pointer toward a prophecy, and everything came tumbling down. That night at the ministry had been especially useful, letting her hear the words as they had been spoken. And now Slytherin had been destroyed by Gryffindor, Hufflepuff torn apart by those two together and all that was needed to complete the set was for the might of Ravenclaw to split Gryffindor's true spirit apart. Should that mean she should kill Harry Potter? She wasn't quite sure yet.

The man was just in front of her, he didn't even know the providence, or the power contained within the object he carried. he thought it a mere trinket, more fool him. The witch paused, she had never managed to complete an _Avada Kedavra_, it was funny. She didn't have any compunctions about using the curse, or any of the other unforgivables, it was just that she'd... never been able to summon the hatred. She just couldn't feel that strongly about anyone, it was only ever indifference.

She shrugged, and cast her favourite hex – the best witch of her age, with a hundred other spells under her belt, but she had always had a soft spot for this one. Before her, the man's skull ruptured as chiropetra exploded from his face, flying into the night.

Chapter 37

Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts put down the book with a weary sigh. Its fiendish puzzles had bested him this time, but he knew that he would prevail in the end. He had to. Agent Arthur depended on him.

He looked about him into the tricked-out, no-longer dinginess of his underground rooms. The Jacuzzi bubbled away quietly to itself in the corner, the neon lights that circled the private bar hummed quietly to themselves. It was too quiet, and he had no-one to share the quiet with. It made him sad.

He wanted to call up the headmistress and her deputy, but then again he didn't. He knew that there were things that McGonagall wasn't telling him. She was a truly powerful witch and she hid her secrets well, and he knew that there was something dark in those secrets. Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts had still been unable to discover the whereabouts of that final book, the one that related to mystery of 'Home Economics' and the oppression of the house elves. A mystery that had been lost in time, and as such, his favourite sort.

Of course, that brought in further complications – the secret society 'the priory of spew,' or it might just have been SPEW – was involved. And then there was that weird girl who led her own private army, the DA they called it. Of course she claimed that she was only the lieutenant, but then everyone knew about lieutenants, how they were all leather and uniforms, sleeping with their commanders even as they plotted to take over command themselves. Actually that was an interesting thought. Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts decided that the hot-tub was rather a good idea at the moment. All would be revealed soon, he had a close friend visiting soon, flying into Glasgow. Until then, well...

Chapter 38

The dark night slid past the car. Snape stared from the window. The wheels turned. The night rolled on.

Chapter 39

'I thought that you liked me?'

'Well, you were wrong.'

'Then what do you call that? All the things that we did?'

'Look, Dean, just, fucking grow up, ok?'

'I would have done anything for you, you know. Anything you wanted.'

'Well you did. You got me Harry. The boy who doesn't notice anything –except Draco fucking Malfoy – unless its right up there in his face and out of his reach.' Ginny's voice was urgent whisper.

'He noticed Cho Chang.'

'Don't even mention that bitch in front of me, Dean.'

'Or what?'

'You know full well what I could do to you. Now I don't care what you thought you meant to me, or what you thought I meant to you, It was nothing. Now why don't you just go and fuck Parvati or someone and get it out of your system. You're a big strong lad, everyone likes you so get a grip of yourself.'

'Ginny, I don't want anyone else. I want you.'

'Why do you have to do this? Why do you have to be so pathetic.'

'But I was going to take you to see the Hammers, we were gonna meet Steve Harris at the after-game, I thought that you wanted to be a part of that.'

'Then you obviously have no idea of what it is that I want,' Ginny hissed.

'Hey you two,' Harry said, sauntering up. 'What's up Dean. Yo, Ginny. Get down ho.'

'Hello Harry,' Dean said civilly. Very civilly.

'Hey Dean, you'll be up for this. I've heard that 50 Knut's coming over to Britain. He's going to be playing in Glasgow. Do you guys want to bust out and see him? Yo?'

'Actually, I'm not really a fan,' Dean said. 'I find his flow lazy and pedestrian and his lyrics either boring or merely offensive. And that lisp isn't fooling anyone.'

Ginny draped herself pornographically against Harry. 'I'll go and see it with you,' she said. 'I'd love to. Just to be with you.'

Harry's trousers twitched.

Chapter 40

'We're leaving you.'

'What?'

Lucius was firm. 'We're leaving you. I'm sorry, sire, but that's the way it is.'

'But. But-'

'You were getting better?' Lucius said kindly. 'I know.'

'I think that I've really made it, this time,' Voldemort spluttered. He suddenly felt like he was standing on nothing. The world was no longer beneath him, but floating off into space, and Lucius was snipping off his tether with a grin.

'And I'm glad for you,' Lucius was saying, 'I really am. But it's not what the rest of us need. We've supported you in this, helped you to find yourself, but you don't need us anymore. You're strong enough to do it on your own.'

'I, I-'

'Only ever wanted immortality. I know But that's not what the rest of us need. We need stability. A good home for the children. The tools to pass on a system of hereditary privilege and ensure that power stays with _us_. Always.'

'I only wanted what was best,' Voldemort whimpered, stunned. 'For all of us.'

'My liege, we love you. And that's why we came out here with you, but, you're not like us. You don't understand what its like. To be honest, you're common, and we're not. People think that the upper classes are a different world, and they're right. And we need to rejoin that world, for our own sakes. I wish it were different, but its not. The way is open, the half-blood Snape's constant betrayals have destroyed his plans to sieve control for himself and left him trapped in an nightmare of existentialist angst and now we must re-take our places. It is our duty, a duty of government,_ noblesse oblige_ no less. I'm truly sorry that it is so. But you must understand.'

Voldermort stared blankly. 'And Narcissa, and Belly?'

'They're already in the car,' Lucius said. 'They thought that it would be easier this way.'

'And Draco?'

Draco looked up from his copy of Paranoia Magazine (I know, it's a real magazine. For fuck's sake, it's actually beyond parody) at his name. 'Come on son,' Lucius said. 'Say goodbye to uncle Voldie. We're going home.'

'Home?' Draco said, wandering over to give the Dark Lord Voldemort, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Wizard Bane, The Seven-Souled Master of Evil, a goodbye hug. 'Does that mean I get to see Harry Potter again?'

'Yes, son. It means you get to see Harry Potter again,' Lucius sneered tiredly. Almost out of habit. 'I suppose the boy's at least pretty much a full-blood,' he added to himself as an exasperated afterthought. 'Just you remember the promise that we made to Pansy's parents though.'

They walked out of the motel room and let the door close quietly on Voldemort's mute form. He held it in as long as he could, because he didn't want anyone to see him fall apart.

Chapter 41

Wheels turned. Night churned. Darkness enclosed his mind. Snape stirred, the driver of the car turned to him and said, 'we're just coming up to the hairy part of the St. Bernard.' The clutch engaged. Free-spinning gears caught their teeth together and began to turn, grinding forward, and the Earth span upon its axis.

Chapter 42

'Hey, mudblo-'

Hermione flicked off a bat-bogey hex from the practised tip of her wand and sent Pansy Parkinson pitching headlong to the ground before she could even finish her taunt. Hermione didn't have time for this today.

She found Harry at last in the astronomy tower, contemplating the vast Scottish tundra that surrounded his domain.

'Harry,' she said. 'At last. I've been looking for you for ages. we're losing touch, Harry, we're losing sight of what's important. I, I wanted to talk to you, Harry. Properly.'

'All the time-turners were destroyed, weren't they?' Harry asked.

'What? Yes. Yes they were.' Hermione said. 'But, Harry, listen to me.'

'You hate me, don't you?' Harry continued, his hand gripping the hilt of the sword of Gryffindor.

'I. Err. I. Harry, I don't hate you,' Hermione spluttered.

'I know that you do,' Harry said gently. 'It's ok. You don't have to deny it. Sometimes, when we're sitting around together, the force of it almost floors me. You never say anything, but I can feel it, coming off you in waves.'

Hermione tried to say something, but found that she couldn't. Harry started to pace.

'You think that, once, I was a nice kid with a lot of potential,' he continued. 'A little bit slow, a little bit headstrong but with his heart in the right place. I know I'm right when I say this. But now you think that I've changed. I've become self-seeking and arrogant, unable to accept help and obsessed with sex and power. A mere cipher for my own delusions. You still wonder why I have never mourned my godfather – whether a man like me really has the mental stability to do all the things that I am supposed to do.'

Hermione said nothing. Something calmed deep inside her. Harry closed his eyes and shook his head. 'I know what's going on,' he said. 'I know it all.'

The flash of light was swallowed by the mist and the bright noon sun but the scream rang loud across the glens.

Chapter 43

'It's too much. There's too many things to remember. Too many plots, too many loose ends, just too much story to keep it all in line. I don't know. I just don't know. It's all unravelling and I can't keep it in place. How do you keep it funny? How do you keep it going?'

'So you're actually coming to me for advice then?'

'No, I'm just having a nervous breakdown due to the fact that I'm _this_ close to finishing _the thing_ that has been my life for the last ten years and I just _happen_ to be having it in front of you.'

'That's not funny.'

'I know.'

'But then again, towards the end it never really is. The end is where people start dying, where it stops being funny and starts being important.'

'Is that so?'

Chapter 44

'Go on, Harry,' said Ginny. 'It's turkey time. Gobble, gobble, gobble.'

Chapter 45

'Hello there,' Luna said. 'I came to check on the owls. Apparently, if you send owls out at the right frequency you can control what people are thinking. The CIA do it with electromagnetic radiation all the time of course, but I wanted to check that MI7 weren't doing it with our owls. Are you ok?'

'Harry's gone,' Hermione said. Her eyes were red as if from crying, but her face was set like stone.

'Gone where?' Luna asked.

'Just gone,' Hermione said. 'Gone completely.'

'That's a shame,' said Luna absently. 'I found this shield with a great big 'R' on the front of it in the Ravenclaw common room and I wanted to show it to him. Oh well, I'm sorry about your cat.'

'What about it? What about Crookshanks?'

'Well, it's not a very pretty cat, is it? I thought that that might have been why you were crying. Because it isn't a very pretty cat. Goodbye.'

'Goodbye, Luna.'

Chapter 46

Villiana Redherring sat in the Slytherin common room and rubbed her hands together evilly. Just for show.


	4. Part 4

Chapter 47

Glasgow. Night. Some club or other. Harry and Ginny flipped out and bust moves with horrible, desperate intensity in the way that only a pair of emotionally unstable, middle class, white teenagers at a hip-hop club can. It was painful to watch. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Chapter 48

'Hey, yeer Haaairy Poooterr, is'n ye?' someone said in a truly awful attempt at phonetic Glaswegian.

'No one else's accent is spelt that badly,' Harry said excitedly. 'Hagrid?' He said as he turned around. 'It has to...' Harry's face dropped. '...be,' he finished lamely, for it wasn't the half-giant who stood before him, but an immensely fat man in a stained string vest. 'Who are you?' Harry asked.

'Yer shulda kenned tha' by now, ma bairn,' the man continued, oblivious to the irreperable damage he was doing to the readers' brains. 'Wha' wi' all of them clues tha' aye left yer.'

Harry looked blank.

'Horcruxes?' the lame Scottish stereotype tried.

'Oh, what? Oh, yeah, yeah. So you're R.A.B. then?'

'Tha's right, Rab. Rab C. Nesbitt. At your service.'

'Oh for fuck's sake,' Harry shook his head. 'How long have you been waiting to do that gag?'

Since I finished reading Half Blood Prince.

'I'm going to go over there now,' Harry said. 'Goodbye.'

Chapter 49

Over there was where 50 Knut was, just hanging out, you know, because that's what rock rap stars do when they've finished a gig. Like in movies and stuff. I've seen it. Honest.

They're really good places to have a conversation as well. You never have to shout.

Well, they didn't in the matrix.

'Shizzle, man. It's H. Pizzle in the hizzle,' said 50 Knut.

'I thought you were supposed to be a parody of 5 pence, or 50 cent or whatever his name is, not Snoop Dogg,' Ginny admonished.

'Yeah baby,' Knut lisped, 'that's why you find me in the club.'

'And are you making love?' Ginny asked. Innocently.

'I could be,' Knut leered at Ginny.

Ginny looked over at Harry, who was staring vacantly into space, 'we'll talk about it later,' she said, 'Harry, what's up?'

'My spidey senses are tingling,' Harry said.

'What?' said Ginny.

'Oh, actually I think It's just the batphone.'

'What?'

'It's my mobile phone, lover,' Harry said slowly.

'Are you going to answer it then?' Ginny said, equally slowly.

'What? Oh, yes.' Harry took out the phone. 'Hello?' he said into the mouthpiece. 'Yeah, hey man. What? Fuck. Holy shitting fuck, yeah. I'm there. I'm right there. See you in five.'

'What the hell?' Ginny asked.

'We've got to go, Ginny,' Harry said. 'The school is under attack, it's the Death Eaters, they've reformed and they want to kick off their re-union tour on my fucking turf. We have to Apparate, now!'

Ginny disappeared with a flick of her wand and a loud crack. Harry Paused before he turned to Knut. 'And you, keep your fucking hands off my woman.'

'Or what, I've been shot 9 times you know.'

'Yeah, and I fucking killed Voldemort, the greatest dark wizard of our age.'

'Voldemort? You didn't kill him, that guy lives just a few doors from me, in Hollywood, California. He was in the new Conan movie, people say he might even be going to go for Governor next year.'

'What?' Harry said. 'But... I thought.' And then he Apparated himself.

After the crack there was a moment of silence.

'Hey, there you are,' Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts shouted out across the room. 'Good to see you again, man.'

'Ho!' 50 Knut called back. 'So are you going to explain why you brought me out here then?'

'Of course, of course. Come over here and I'll tell you all about it.' Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts led the rapper to a little roped off area of the club. 'I've got us access to the _executive lounge_. It's great, we get dancing girls and free biscuits as well.'

Chapter 50

'Bone's, Bell, McMillan, I want you on me. Move out on my command and only on my Command,' Ron Bellowed at the squad. 'Finnegan take point, let me know if anything comes up that I don't want coming up. Patil, Patil, I need the left hand side out of bounds, bombardment pattern delta. Vary your firepower and keep them guessing but I want hexes impacting and I want them five minutes ago. Granger's goons have got our right side covered so I don't want you even thinking its in danger. Squad, lets GO!'

'Sir, yes sir.'

Ron ran out from the cover, the four DA soldiers keeping in a loose diamond formation about him, ducking low to keep their profiles small and heading towards the broomstick cupboard on the far side of the quidditch pitch. He felt a great _FOOM_ and a rush like electricity tracing up his backbone as the first of the Patils' hexes arced overhead and slammed into the ground just short of the Death Eaters' position.

Immediately a burst of retaliation fire chewed up the ground around his squad. Bones leapt aside and came up in a roll, the spot where she had been a moment before smoked viciously and the smell of sulphur wafted into Ron's nose, but there was not time to dwell on it. If only he could get his squad airborne then they might at last have the advantage. For now he cast a double-image charm on the group and kept up the run-dodge-run pattern they had drilled themselves with so very many times before.

'Something's not right,' Hermione said. 'Shit! This can't be happening now. Shit.'

'What's up, sir?' Spinnet asked her squad leader. They had drawn back from the main fighting, letting the Slytherins lay down a pattern of suppression fire.

'Time's all fucked up,' Hermione said. 'I can't believe I didn't spot it before, I was using a time-turner for a whole year. I just didn't want to see what I was really seeing. I'm such a idiot. And now its bad, really fucking bad.'

'But sir, I thought that all the time-turners were destroyed.'

'Yeah, but that doesn't mean that people suddenly forgot how to make them, does it?' Hermione managed a dry laugh. 'Spinnet, you're acting sergeant. I want you to make sure that my men all come back in one piece. There's a massive time paradox about to break and I have to try and stop it.'

Harry Apparated directly into the command post (with Dumbledore gone and all the other teachers away in London for a teacher training weekend it looks like the fortress-like security of Hogwarts is really beginning to slip doesn't it – and maybe it has something to do with that _other_ prophecy as well...). Ginny was already there, as were Neville and Luna.

'Just in time,' said Ginny.

A bolt of Purple light hit Ron square in the chest and he went down screaming and writhing as his body sprouted deformed extra limbs and hundreds of eyes on stalks and sharp-toothed mouths tore themselves open on his flesh.

Luckily the real Ron was safely in the cover of the broom shed, trying to jimmy open its enthusiastically locked door and watching his image burn itself into an acidic goo. A screech cut the air and Ron looked up to see the Hippogriff formerly known as Buckbeak wheel down toward the Death Eater's emplacement. Just before it tore into there line, though, a bolt of energy caught the beast and it turned into stone mid-flight, plummeting forward with all its momentum to dash itself to pieces on some conveniently located rocks.

'Hah!' a Death Eater shouted, 'lets see Aslan breath life back into you now, you gimp.' But the man fell back again, gurgling clawing wildly as he took a _Sectumsempra_ to the throat.

'Shit,' Ron said, and renewed his efforts to break into the shed.

Chapter 51

Spells rocked the walls of the command post and fizzled through the air all around them. The air stank of magic, a smell like white noise with the taste of cordite running through it.

'Behind you,' Luna shouted.

Harry turned, and staggered back in shock. A second Luna, her eyes blazing with unearthly hatred, bore down on him, he knew not where from. She carried a large shield and she had her wand levelled at his chest.

'_Expelliamus_!' she shouted, and Harry's wand flew from his hand. Instinctively, Harry drew the sword of Gryffindor from where it rested at his side and charged into the Ravenclaw, swinging wildly. Luna battered the sword aside with the shield she carried, reaching into her robes with her wand hand, and as Harry crowded in on her there was a flash of something bright. Harry suddenly stopped, there was a moment of quiet, then he coughed quietly and staggered backwards. The sword clattered from his hands and, wide-eyed, slowly, Harry fell to the floor, the long hilt of a dagger protruding just below his ribs.

'You bitch!' Ginny shouted. '_AVADA KEDAVRA_!' She screamed, surprising even herself. the second Luna raised the shield vainly but the green bolt of energy streamed around it and engulfed her. There was a crack and Ginny staggered backwards, looking sick, then the green light that had filled the room disappeared. The second Luna lay still, unmarked but unmoving with the shield resting beside her, cracked into two.

'You killed her.' Neville said, quietly. Luna said nothing. Ginny marched up to the body and tore open the robes. She pulled at an object that was nestled into the corpse's breast and held it aloft triumphantly.

'So, it's you who's been playing us all for the fool,' she said, rounding on Luna.

'That doesn't belong to me,' Luna said quietly.

'Exactly,' Ginny hissed. 'Maybe I should kill you now. Then you won't get a chance to go back and make this whole mess.'

'Y-you can't do that,' Neville said, stepping in front of Luna, his eyes fixed on the time turner that dangled from Ginny's grasp. 'You don't know all the facts.'

'Come on Neville,' Ginny said. 'Wake up. It's time to pick a side. Who are you going to believe, your own house-mate or a tricky little Ravenclaw whore?'

'You can't do things like this, Ginny,' Neville said, and he reached for his own wand.

'No, don't,' Luna started to say, but Ginny cut her off.

'Quit trying to stand up to people more powerful than you are.' Ginny flicked her own wand and Neville crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

'Why didn't you kill him?' Luna asked.

'Because I'm not that kind of girl.'

Chapter 52

He flew through the stratosphere on a broomstick, even though it was not his mode of transport of choice, shedding plot points and discarding loose ends as he did so. He was full, his energy limitless and complete, and he would need never to eat again.

Chapter 53

'You did it didn't you?' Hermione asked, her voice a counterpoint to the background thuds and high shrieks of the hex bombardment that even yet continued.

The other which spoke slowly, her voice heavy and almost drunken: 'The prophecy has been fulfilled, the power of the houses are mine alone – and soon, the power of the gods as well.'

'You haven't won yet,' Hermione said, 'two can play the time game. I could go back too, set things up just right to defeat everything that you have done here.'

'You think that if you set up the cage I wouldn't have set up the key?' the witch stood surrounded by bodies and laughed. 'That if you set up the sandbag, I wouldn't have set up another gun.?'

'Which would be a fake with a message, of course.'

'"Wyld Stallyns rule"? I didn't think you had a sense of humour, Hermione?'

'I don't. We're evenly matched and I know that the time turner's still here, one of them at least. I said those things because I knew that they would lock us into a paradox. If we both intend to win by going back in time after we've won, then neither of us can win until one of us has already won. It's a stalemate, repeating and repeating, like an electron that's in two places at the same time and won't be located until you look at it. Only there's no-one out there to look at it, no-one to open that door and see which one of us is still standing.

'Harry's both alive and dead at the same time,' Hermione continued. 'Maybe we'll all just disappear and the world will be a better place without us, never knowing we existed. I don't know. It's like Schrödinger's cat, only it's not a cat, it's one of my best friends.'

'I'm sorry, Hermione. It's a very noble plan, but with a very obvious flaw: I know you thought I was too much of a proud pureblood wizard to listen, but you're not the only one who's been keeping up on the muggle's theories. Having a dad like mine is always a help if you need a crackpot idea or two. You see, there's a theory that the universal observer is God. I'm not sure if I go with that, but all the same I'm afraid your waveform just collapsed, and _I _know exactly where the electron is going to turn out to have been.'

The witch held up her hand, it was sheathed in a glow of power that seemed to strain out into the grounds of the school. She said a single, soft word: 'Stop.'

Ron climbed high into the sky, his squad forming up behind him.

'Right lads,' he said. 'Let's send in the cavalry and really fuck some shit up.'

He turned his broom into a dive and headed in a shallow easterly arc, straight for the Death Eaters flank. Ron readied his wand as they approached, weak, long-range hexes whistling harmlessly past his ears. 'Wait for it,' he said.

And then there was a calm.

It washed over them like the softest shockwave ever, and as it passed through the Death Eaters it held each one of them up like a puppet transfixed from a string to its heart. And then the Death Eaters dropped, all at once to the floor. Dead.

'As I said before, all the power of the houses are mine together. You are no match for me.'

Chapter 54

'Is it time for the copout ending yet?'

'I don't know how else you're going to do it.'

'If I kiss you, do you turn into a handsome prince?'

'That depends, are you a princess.?'

'Of course I'm a princess, I'm a fucking Sue, aren't I?'

'It figures, and I don't think I bear any relation to the person I was originally based on either, so I suppose it might work.'

'Good. I'm not actually going to kiss you. I just wanted to make sure. That's all.'

'Bugger.'

Chapter 55

The broomstick smashed through the roof of the command centre and the occupant threw himself from it before it shredded itself into splinters. He dropped into a roll and pushed himself up to standing, and brushed the dust from his jet black robes.

'No!' the witch cried. 'Fucking no. It's my _deus ex_. I'm the one who did all the shit, who made all the little adjustments that held the plot together. Me!'

'It was my book you stole, however. Did you not think that I would have cast the spell myself? I am Judas Iscariot reborn. I am the traitor-god, the dark hand that paves the way toward sacrifice and redemption and I have eaten the god-food, the heart-of-all. For thirty nights I have faced the darkness, I have fought the angst of unbeing and I have felt the nothing crowd in around me. I have realised the freedom of man, his truest trap and I have eaten of the meat of the breast of the beast and I will be sustained forever. I will transcend, that is true, but for now, my power is unbounded.'

'Does that mean you're a vampire then?' the witch asked sarcastically.

'Yes,' said Snape. 'And Dumbledore was really Ron Weasly. Gone back in time.'

'Actually. I'm a vampire,' said 50 Knut, strolling in through the door. 'I only started with the whole rap thing after it became obvious how hopelessly, pathetically out of date glam-rock was becoming. My real name is Lest-'

'Shut up!' everyone shouted at him. 'Do you want to get us sued?'

An owl flew in surreptitiously through the hole made in the roof by Snape and started to peck at the dead Luna's face.

'And I've solved the cryptogram!' crowed Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University Hogwarts. 'I know who did it.'

'Yes,' said Luna, standing up and apparently not dead. 'It was Ginny. She's a sociopath, willing to use anyone and any means to get exactly what she wants, never caring about the consequences. I'm surprised none of you saw it before. It's been evident since she was very young. She put me under the imperius curse and sent me back in time to kill her boyfriend, just so that she could have a lot of power. It's funny really. Except that it isn't.'

'Fuck you, bitch,' Ginny retorted. 'I killed you. You don't get to add to the conversation. It's against the rules.'

'You didn't though,' Luna said. 'Actually, you killed yourself. The curse you cast hit the shield, Ravenclaw's shield apparently, and I can say it certainly helped me out in my time of need. You had made it a horcrux, like you did the sword, which was a little bit silly. The killing curse killed the piece of your soul in the shield and I was only half destroyed by its power.'

'I had to send a little piece of me back in time with you, if I wanted to keep control, didn't I? And I didn't think I was going to use the _killer_,' Ginny mused. 'I didn't realise I cared that strongly about Harry. I was gong to blast you with a bat-bogey or something, the lethal version I taught you guys at DA classes those years back.'

'If you were half killed and under an imperius curse,' Hermione wondered. 'What are you doing here now?'

'Well, I knew what Ginny was plotting, and I thought about what MI7 were doing with owls and thought control. So I wondered if it couldn't be done the other way. If I couldn't upload myself, my thoughts and feelings, into the owl network for safe keeping?'

'Shut up!' Ginny snarled. 'I don't bloody care. You've all been wittering away for long enough now. It ends here. The world is mine. I have the power and you shall bow before me.'

'You don't' said Luna. 'Just try it.'

Ginny held her hands aloft. Nothing happened.

'It's changed. I'm still here, the houses have not been turned one against another. Ravenclaw stands firm and the others shall rally about her, their strength reborn. Go on then Snape. Do your thing.

White light voided the scene and the gods moved in their mysterious ways.

Chapter 56

Harry Potter woke up in his cramped bed in the cupboard under the stairs. He had just had the strangest of dreams and his forehead ached and itched strangely, as if it was being troubled by an ancient scar.

'No,' screamed Ginny to the walls of her plastic prison. 'You can't end it like that! However you end it, I don't care. Just not like that.'

'We are the next stage in your evolution,' she added for good measure. But no-one was listening.

Chapter 57

Harry Potter woke up. His skull ached terribly. His friends surrounded his bed. Ron and Hermione, arms around each other's waists, on one side and Luna and Nevilee, hand in hand on the other.

'Hey, Ron,' said Harry, 'I'm. I'm sorry about your sister.'

'Don't worry, mate,' Ron said genially. 'It's not your fault. Hell there are a lot of us Weasley kids, and two arseholes out of seven isn't bad going by anyone's standards. Anyway, I've been listening to a lot of Iron Maiden while you were unconscious. It explains a lot of things.'

'Only two?' Harry queried, and then he winced as he suddenly realised how much pain filled his body.

'Why _am_ I still alive?' Harry said.

'Oh,' said Luna. 'That knife, I got it off Fred and George. I was going to use it as a Halloween prank. It's charmed to make it look like you've killed someone, only you haven't. And do you know the best thing about it? It doesn't even leave a scar.'


End file.
